Martha Peake (54 page)

It was a large room with a southern exposure over the marsh, misty this day, the hills and woods indistinct in the far distance. I felt at once the warmth and comfort, intimacy even, peculiar to the room long occupied by this remarkable tenant, a man of simple tastes and bookish inclinations. There was a rug on the floor, a fire blazing in the wide hearth, a table beneath the window covered in papers, and one wall occupied by a massive glass-fronted bookcase. On the wall over the fireplace, and facing the bed, hung a portrait of a young woman who could only be Martha Peake, and painted by the same hand as “The American Within.” All this I took in at a glance.
My eye then came to rest on the great bed, piled high with bolsters, against which reclined the august figure of Harry Peake.

“Ambrose Tree,” he murmured, or lisped, rather, in the manner of old men who lack for teeth. “Who taught you to fire a pistol?”

It took me a second to understand that this was a joke. Ah, he was benign!

“Come here by me,” he said.

There was a chair by the bed. I crossed the room and sat down, and Harry lifted a huge hand. I gave him my hand, and he grasped it, enclosed it, rather, swallowed it up in his own, and held it so firmly I did not believe he would ever let me go. He gazed at me for several moments before releasing me, and I held his eye. It was all there in his face, all I had seen in the portrait below, but faded and bloated by time, the starkness softened by a webbing of tiny lines, hatched and cross-hatched in the loose gray elephant skin that hung now from jowl and cheekbone and bagged about the mouth and beneath the chin. The great clefts were visible still in the gaunt structural joists of that massive face, but superimposed on every flap and wedge of baggy flesh the relentless crow’s-foot markings of the years. The hair was white as snow now, pulled back from a peak high on his forehead and tied in a ponytail, and the large ears with their long droopy lobes flowered from the sides of his huge head, pale gray and translucent within. Oh, it was an atlas, Harry’s face, and in it might be located every destination to which the human spirit ever travelled.

Thus did I regard him as I returned the gaze of those old dark eyes within which a flame yet burnt, though weakly now. As for his spine, it was hidden in his heap of pillows, but in his posture, as he sat up in the bed, a bentness was evident at once, a stooping or hollowing of the frame. I told him at once and with some feeling how sorry I was to have shot my pistol at him.

He continued to gaze at me, a smile playing about his thin old lips, collapsed now upon their toothless gums. He waved away my apology with a majestic indifference.

“You have seen my Martha?” he whispered, indicating the painting.

I said I had.

“A strong likeness, do you think?”

My mouth hung open; I had been about to say I had never laid eyes on his daughter, she died before I was born, but I paused, I reflected that I
did
know her, had I not aroused her in my imagination and followed her from Cornwall to Cape Morrock, and been present at her death?

“A good likeness,” I said.

“Do you see her mother in her?”

“Indeed I do,” I said, and I did; wondering, which of us is the mad one here, him, to be asking this, or me, to be answering?

“And do they still remember her?”

His wispy voice cracked a little as he said this. It had begun stronger, not strong as I imagined it when he strode about the taproom of a Cripplegate tavern and declaimed his ballad, but it lost more of its power with every succeeding question, and was now but a shadow of a whisper.

“She will not be forgotten,” I said, and I meant it. For his sake I would make her name live again as it had during the Revolution, for I could not tolerate the thought that all this suffering was for nothing.

“God bless,” whispered Harry, and sank back and closed his eyes. I found that he had taken my hand once more, and as he lay breathing deep with his eyes closed, his grip on me was as strong as it had been before. So I sat there, leaning forward, and the minutes passed. At last William silently approached the bed, extricated my fingers from Harry’s grasp, and led me from the room.

In the hours after my visit Harry sank fast. Again I came to his bed, but he did not at first take my hand, nor did his eyes show the fire they had the day before, there was but an ember in them now, the
faintest glow. When he spoke I could barely hear him, and I put my head close to his face.

Now his hand fell upon mine, and held it in a grip more steely even than before. I asked him to repeat what he had said, and he gasped it out with no small difficulty.

“We burn!”

“We burn?”

“We burn!”

And that was all.

44

T
he hours and days immediately after Harry’s death are almost too painful for me to contemplate. What made my own remorse so intolerably poignant was observing the profound grief of both my uncle and his servant, Percy. They had loved the old poet dearly. For half-a-century they had sheltered him in Drogo Hall, far from the temptations of the London gin shops, and well beyond the reach of those of his countrymen who would taunt and abuse him for his physical deformity.

We buried him two days later. The minister had lived in the village for many years, and had known Lord Drogo well. He understood what his lordship had done for Harry, and he understood too, for William had explained it to him, the circumstances of Harry’s death. I insisted of course on being a coffin bearer; and so, with nine strong men from the village, I helped carry him from the church to his final resting place, a grave he himself had selected, not far from the Vault of the Drogoes, and but a few feet from the tree beneath which he had committed his own great crime against Nature. I tossed earth onto the massive coffin, when it had been lowered into the ground, and made no attempt to stanch the flow of my tears. Nor was I alone in my grief, for when I looked up I saw that the old men gathered at the graveside, William, and Percy, and the minister, as well as several
dozen men, women, and children from the village, all were weeping as copiously as I was. During the long years of his seclusion in Drogo Hall Harry had been loved by all who knew him, and his gentle spirit was already missed.

After the funeral I returned to the house with my uncle. He had put it about that Harry Peake, after a short illness, had succumbed at last, in the weakness of age, to the marsh fever. Nor would Percy reveal the truth of the matter. The two old men continued deeply saddened by the tragedy, but in their sadness there was no anger directed toward me, nor even blame; they only wished that Harry had followed William’s instruction, that he was not to show himself to me until Martha’s story was at an end. I asked my uncle why he had given Harry this instruction, and he told me that if he were to answer that question he would have to tell me something of the years Harry had spent in Drogo Hall.

“Then tell me,” said I, “for my presence is not required elsewhere.”

So my uncle began once more to talk, and although everything was changed now, it was as though this were a night like those which had preceded it, when we sat by the fire in his panelled study, the trolley clinking and clanking as Percy pushed it over to my uncle’s elbow, and from the wall above the mantelpiece the proud features of Harry Peake gazed out across the wild windswept moors of his youth.

It was another picture of Harry Peake that William painted for me that night, and as he talked so did my own grief, and the remorse that came hard upon it, rise in waves within me, and I suffered the first and fiercest of the pangs that would harrow me in the months to come, indeed that harrow me to this very day. He described to me how they cleaned Harry up, Drogo and himself, how they burned his filthy rags of clothing, then bathed him, and shaved him, and cut his fingernails. They gave him new clothes, and hot food, and within a
day he was already beginning to rally. Although his mind was still alienated, said my uncle, and he had no proper grasp of his own history or identity.

I was moved by this. The simple kindness of those two men, to a ragged lunatic in his last extremity—and Percy too, my uncle murmured, do not forget Percy, he it was who followed Harry in his mad wanderings, he who slowly won his trust and brought him in; Harry would doubtless have perished, but for Percy’s vigilance. Percy’s vigilance!—I was seeing my uncle’s servant in a new light, as I was seeing everything in a new light. Oh, large structures were collapsing in my mind, but new structures were rising to take their place.

It was fortunate, said William, when we had refreshed ourselves, that Lord Drogo had recently started upon a course of study in the diseases of the mind, realizing, as no other anatomist of his day would do, that the mental faculty was in principle no different from the other faculties of the human integral, and no less subject to disorder; and that the investigation of such disorder was the royal road to an understanding of the structure and function of the mind.

He became a student of madness?

Among his many and various scientific pursuits, yes. And he undertook to effect a cure for Harry’s madness, Harry’s bodily ailments disappearing rapidly when he began to eat again, and had excreted the last of the gin that was in him. Lord Drogo believed that Harry’s powers of mind were no less formidable than those of his body, and that they had only to be roused to their former vitality for the madness to dissipate like so much smoke in a closed room, after the windows are opened.

So he walked with Harry, and they talked, hour after hour they talked. After breakfast William would see them go off across the marsh together, and a strange sight they were too, Harry huge and bent, and still thin as a stick, Lord Drogo marching beside him, short and compact, and swinging a cane, each man in cloak and hat, two natural philosophers taking to the countryside. Only it was not natural philosophy they discussed, it was the wild imaginings of
Harry’s disordered mind, and these Lord Drogo listened to, and gently questioned, and day by day it became more apparent that Harry was recapturing his reason, which for so long had been fugitive.

I listened in rapt silence to these wonders.

In the fullness of time, said my uncle, Harry came to understand all that had transpired since the day he first walked away from Drogo Hall, and returned across the marsh to London with Lord Drogo’s coin clinking in his pocket, and gave himself over to the gin. Oh, and the suffering he then endured! Harry Peake, said my uncle, had a large tumultuary heart, and his horror at his own actions knew no moderation. We had to watch him closely during this time, he said, for fear he would do harm to himself. Percy never slept, he was Harry’s very shadow, for when Harry understood what he had done to his beloved Martha, how he had driven her from him with the violence of his suspicions, and then, at the last, attacked and ravished her in the graveyard—he wept like a child, he wept all one long night and all of the following day; and when his tears were dry he demanded the means to take ship for America, so that he could find Martha and make his peace with her; and he was cast into a deeper despair on learning that we were at war with the colonies, and that such a journey was impossible.

“Then I will join the king’s army,” cried Harry, “and once on American soil, I will desert the army and look for my lost girl.”

And he fully intended to do it.

But it was not to be. Lord Drogo persuaded Harry to wait until the hostilities had come to an end, which it was thought at the time would be a matter of months only, the Americans being regarded as poor soldiers, lacking in organization, money, materials of war, courage adequate to their purpose, and the will to persevere. Drogo was of course wrong in his estimate of the colonists’ determination to be free, but he was not alone in this; and by the time they understood their mistake, said William, it was already too late, for news had come of Martha’s death, and Harry sank into a more bleak despair than any they had yet seen.